[eschaton]

Is anyone else finding it very strange that in the U.S., Omicron is almost over, but in Europe the decline seems to have stalled out?

I mean, the U.S. isn't alone in this. The rest of the Americas is also showing consistent declines, and Australia isn't doing badly either. But in Europe cases are either still rising or more-or-less stalled out. There are a few countries showing fairly big declines (Italy, Spain, France) but even here it's declining slower than the U.S.

What I think is happening is more heavily-enforced social distancing is prolonging Omicron. Which honestly is to be expected - that was the initial point of these policies, not to stop anyone from getting infected, but to stretch out the infections over time in order to stop hospital systems from being overwhelmed.

But the U.S. experience shows that a developed country can take the hospital load from Omicron. Hell, given the higher vaccination rates in most of Europe, one would think that most European countries would be able to deal with the hospital strain much more robustly.